A recent report suggests that unless Qatar issues and enforces sweeping labor reforms soon, more than 4,000 migrant workers in the country will die before it hosts the 2022 World Cup....An estimated 1,200 Indian and Nepalese migrant workers have died in Qatar over the last three years from work-related causes (which include accidents on the job, heart attacks from heat stress, and illness connected to substandard living conditions). The two countries are estimated to supply near half of Qatar's 1.4 million migrant workers.
The legal status of a migrant worker in Qatar and also Dubai is entirely tied to his/her job. If you have a one, you can stay in the country and suffer. If you do not have one, you have to leave and suffer somewhere else. A society has finally arrived at a neoliberal paradise when workers are no longer political subjects, when firing is as good as deportation, when the boss is the government (police, court, judge, housing, immigration officer).
The reason why employers in Qatar are in the habit of seizing the passports of their workers is as much practical as symbolic: the passport registers a human with rights, a human who is recognized and documented as such. To seize a passport is to seize the political as visible—there can also be a politics without the state, a politics "sans papiers." What is left (or more closely, what is desired) is something like Agamben's bare life, a life that can be killed without a sacrifice (work accidents, heat stress, untreated illnesses). The words of a FIFA executive, Theo Zwanzinger: “This feudal system existed before the World Cup...”
